"In 2012, many companies began to rethink conventional ways of doing business when they realized big data analytics could deliver results almost instantaneously," said SAS CEO Jim Goodnight. "When high-performance analytics can solve the world's toughest business problems thousands of times faster, there's no limit to what organizations can achieve."

SAS' 2012 predictive analytics offerings have momentum across industries and customer segments. SAS® Visual Analytics, particularly well received and lauded by analysts in July, August and earlier this month, is a new way to explore large amounts of data in an instant.

2012 was also a banner year for workplace culture recognition. Great Place to Work® named SAS No. 1 on its World's Best Multinational Workplaces list, capping a year in which SAS Belgium and SAS Sweden were also No. 1 on their countries' Best Companies to Work For lists. SAS, which has been ranked as one of Fortune's Best Companies to Work For in the US every year since the list's 1998 inception, was a top workplace in 17 other countries.

"The link is solid between SAS' financial performance and treating employees and customers well," Goodnight said. "When people feel trusted, the results are phenomenal. It's reflected in our commitment to innovation. It's deeply gratifying that we've created a great place to work, not just in the United States, but also worldwide."

SAS Visual Analytics quickly found traction after its March 2012 launch and will remain a focus in 2013. The big data visualization tool was hailed by analysts as customers embraced the value of easy, self-service data exploration. Creditreform, Cosmos Bank, Hong Kong Efficiency Unit, the Internal Revenue Service, SM Marketing Convergence, XL Group and others use SAS Visual Analytics to derive insight from their data.

SAS expects the demand for business insight from big data to increase through 2013. SAS High-Performance Analytics Server combines the speed of large scale in-memory software with the industry's most trusted advanced predictive analytics, offering near-real-time data mining, optimization, text mining and other features.

SAS will continue to emphasize industry-specific solutions, which are built on SAS' strong foundation of analytics and information management technologies. They help organizations unlock value and make better, faster business decisions.

"Dramatic reductions in processing times have bolstered new offerings such as visual analytics and high-performance applications for business. We're also designing and distributing these innovations on iPads and Android devices," said SAS Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Jim Davis. "Our value proposition has never been stronger."